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Weneedavocabularyofresistance|MichelleMoydandYuliyaKomska|Opinion|TheGuardian

Donald Trump is changing our language. We

need a vocabulary of resistance
Trumps speech redundant, formulaic, aggressive, post-literate is everywhere. The language of
resistance, by contrast, doesnt exist

America must devise its own expression of dissent. It cant be the repurposed language of Trump. Photograph: Alamy

Michelle Moyd and Yuliya Komska

Tuesday 17 January 2017 12.00GMT

B y May 1945, Nazi Germany lay in ruins. Church domes succumbed to restorms. The
megalomaniacal designs of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitlers court architect, caved in under the
onslaught of aerial bombs and mortar shells. On this lunar landscape, one period edice
endured: Nazi language.

In his 1947 book Language of the Third Reich, Viktor Klemperer, a German-Jewish philologist,
chronicled the way in which fascism had changed the German tongue. All around him tainted
ocials were being red, streets renamed, libraries purged. But this language had become so
entrenched as to appear indelible. Not the hate-lled speeches, Klemperer felt, that were Hitlers

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surest propaganda weapon, but the individual words, the expressions, the formulations
repeated ad nauseam for citizens to adopt and pass on, mindlessly.

In response, the writing born in this squalor known as rubble or clear-cutter literature set out
to self-denazify. Postwar Germanys bards wrote about the simplest of things in the simplest of
languages. If their works read like lists of pancake ingredients or threadbare belongings it is
because they were.

In the wake of Nazism, these writers intuited, language required deliberate use. Still, there was a
lingering sense that the eorts were too little, too late, as their countrymen and -women carried
on with the characteristic superlatives, hyperboles and extermination-related coinages. Many
abide to this day.

Its not only fascism. Authoritarianism of any shade warps language in lasting ways. Newspeak
spreads fast and furious. Language is like air. You realize how important it is only when it is
messed up. Then it can kill you, the Nobel laureate Herta Mller once cautioned, recalling
communism.

Resistance, then, needs and breeds a language: this much was obvious to the German clear-
cutters, decolonization activists the world over or Soviet-bloc dissidents. But it has yet to dawn
on Donald Trumps opponents.

Trumps language redundant, formulaic, aggressive, post-literate is everywhere. It garners

wide publicity and even merits theoretical treatments. The language of resistance, by contrast,
doesnt exist.

Instead of a new anger-channeling lexicon, there is a tide of borrowings. For months, the
oppositions English has absorbed Trumps idiom by the mouthful, from nasty woman to grab
a pussy. The Democrats wield the slogan Make America Sick Again against the Republican
repeal of Obamacare, and the New York Times runs headlines ending in Sad!

But the irony that fuels this headlong push to colonize and parody, subversive as it may rst
seem, does little but reproduce the familiar speech bubbles. Worse, it creates a distance, as irony
does, where proximity full language ownership is urgently needed.

To follow the lead of a president-elect who popularized saying what everyone is thinking, as
journalist Julia Ioe puts it, has become the gold standard of social media ripostes to Trump,
many embellished with the F-word.

Its true that mat, which is obscene language banned from public use by Vladimir Putin in 2014,
has been a well-known instrument of deance in Russia. But with enough Russian imports to go
around, America must devise its own expression of dissent. If history is any indication, it cant be
the repurposed language of Trump. Whence the obliviousness to this need?

Its possible to chalk it up to Americas inexperience with authoritarianism, although this should
be to its credit. But the real reason is infrastructural. Compared to most other places, the country
pays little heed to language. Outside the educators associations and lone initiatives, no
academies, institutes or advisory boards propel the topic into the public sphere. Not since HL
Mencken has thinking about the American language its diversity, its emancipatory potential
garnered nationwide attention, and he died over six decades ago.

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Instead, the burden of thinking about the issue has fallen to immigrants and minorities. Language
has been on their minds at work, at home and even abroad. In 1979, James Baldwin pondered
parlaying Black English into power while in France. People evolve a language in order to describe
and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they
cannot articulate, he poignantly observed.

The way out now is to stop outsourcing and establish that language matters for all Americans,
always, but especially in radical moments of transition in governance. Inspirations for aecting
the political winds by changing the language need not come from Europe. In 1983, in the small
west African nation of Upper Volta, Cpt Thomas Sankara was aided to presidency by a military-led
coup backed by a leftist coalition.

During his short time in oce, Sankara sparked his peoples collective imagination about their
place in the world. He renamed the country Burkina Faso, or the land of the upright people,
jettisoning its old colonial name. Sankaras revolution radically rethought national priorities,
shifting power to the upright people the Burkinab, and especially to the poor.

Sankara argued that Burkinab needed a new vocabulary to overcome the imperialist past that
still lived on in concepts imposed by the colonizers. The change in language accompanied
sweeping political change. In a 1984 speech to the UN, he spoke for those left behind, noting
that [o]ur revolution in Burkina Faso embraces misfortunes of all peoples. Railing against
international banks, he argued that debt is neo-colonialism. He condemned the capitalist
system as structurally unjust and periodically unhinged. In these stormy times, he asserted,
we cannot leave our enemies of yesterday and today with an exclusive monopoly over thought,
imagination and creativity.

Sankara was assassinated in 1987 by his elite political enemies, including his former army
comrade Blaise Compaor, who ruled for the next three decades. But the nations name, along
with Sankaras revolutionary ideas, weathered Compaors authoritarianism. Nearly 30 years
after the murder, memories of Sankara recently inspired the Burkinab to oust Compaor, forcing
him into exile and calling him to account for his role in the crime. The rudiments of a new
vocabulary helped mobilize a new generation of activists to change their world.

Vocabularies of resistance have germinated among US-based progressives, isolated though each
instance remains. Reverend William Barbers has repeatedly called for a new moral language to
aid with the nations moral debrillation.

Bernie Sanderss presidential campaign rhetoric routinely skewered the oligarchy and
billionaire class. Native American protesters against the Dakota Access pipeline have brought
water protectors into everyday parlance, and Black Lives Matter is now both a rallying cry and a
movement focused on the struggle for black, and all, peoples liberation.

But only broad linguistic disobedience can move beyond the liberal-conservative, left-right
dualities that have proved so damaging to American politics. In a famous 1946 essay, George
Orwell recommended starting at the verbal end to change the course of events. This can be a
silver lining of the Trump years. Because nding a language of resistance doesnt take linguists or
writers.

It takes citizens who grasp, as Baldwin did, the importance of this foremost political instrument,
means, and proof of power.
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